Remembering Rick Hall and the Musical Alchemy of FAME Studios

In a picture taken at FAME Studios in 1970, the music producer Rick Hall (at right) poses with the songwriter and producer Robert “Bumps” Blackwell (center) and the singer Little Richard.

Photograph by House Of Fame LLC / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty

In 1961, the producer Rick Hall recorded “You Better Move
On”—a loping, indignant
song about a dude stuck in love with a woman who’s already promised
herself to another—in a converted tobacco warehouse in Muscle Shoals,
Alabama. The song was written and sung by Arthur Alexander, a bellhop
from nearby Sheffield, and was later covered by the Rolling
Stones, the
Hollies, George Jones
and Johnny Paycheck, and
others. Alexander’s vocal sounds tired, as if he’s chosen to go on
arguing but knows, in some awful and instinctive way, that he’s already
lost the fight: “Can’t you understand, man, she’s my girl?” he sings.
The words drift and disappear. His performance is defiant, but lonesome.
It’s a soul song, but it’s country, too.

“You Better Move On” was enough of a hit for Hall and Alexander—it made
it to No. 24 on the pop chart—that Hall was able to purchase a proper
recording space: a boxy brown-and-beige building on Avalon Avenue, just
a couple miles south of the Tennessee River, in an otherwise
unremarkable stretch of town. FAME Studios would eventually become known
and coveted, globally, for its lush and tender sound. Hall, who died on
Tuesday, at eighty-five, was its engineer and its keeper.

“At different points in time on this planet, there are certain places
where there is a feel of energy,” Jimmy Cliff, the Jamaican ska and
reggae musician, says in “Muscle Shoals,” a 2013 documentary about the
studio. “At this certain point in time, for a number of years, this was
Muscle Shoals.” I don’t know how to explain what was going on there,
either—why so many remarkable records were cut in that room. The history
of American music is punctuated by stories about places like
this—strange, sacred spots, where certain metaphysical tensions briefly
manifest and align. Clarksdale, Bakersfield, Macon. Muscle Shoals.

Hall turned the studio’s bathroom into a makeshift echo chamber. “If you
had to take a crap or something in the bathroom, we had to stop the
session until you got through,” he says in a taped interview from
2015. “We had to
modify things back then. We had to improvise.” He breaks into a dry
cackle, recalling the wildness of it all. The Swampers, the studio’s
house band, played in a funky and particular way—loose-limbed and
groove-oriented. Aretha Franklin later described their sound as
“greasy.” (She also credited the studio with shifting the trajectory of
her career: Hall helped her uncover a different, chunkier part of her
voice.) Everything made there felt soft at the edges, mildewed, as if it
had been left out in the rain for a couple of days. Pilgrims flocked to
Alabama, hungry for some of that heavy air: Etta James, Wilson Pickett,
Bobbie Gentry. In 1966, Percy Sledge recorded “When A Man Loves A
Woman” there. It might be
the best song we have about the devastations and capitulations of deep
love—about the way we all string ourselves up for just a little more
rapture. Duane Allman supposedly set up a pup tent in the parking lot of
FAME, just to be closer to whatever was happening inside. Even then, all
that anybody knew for sure about FAME’s odd and singular alchemy was
that Hall was its principal. “My records were me, they were Rick Hall,”
he said.

Hall was born on January 31, 1932, in Forest Grove, Mississippi. His
father was a sharecropper, and Hall grew up sleeping on a straw bed, in
a house with a dirt floor and no plumbing. His mother split when he was
four. “We grew up like animals. That made me a little bitter, somewhat
driven. I wanted to be special. I wanted to be somebody,” he explains in
“Muscle Shoals.” He eventually got a job as an apprentice to a
toolmaker, in Rockford, Illinois, and started playing in local bands.
Later, he returned to the South—to Florence, Alabama—to work in an
aluminum factory. After both his first wife and his father died within a
two-week period, he suffered a kind of spiritual breakdown. “I freaked
out. I became a drunk, a vagabond, a tramp,” he admitted. But Hall
ultimately figured out a way to redirect his grief—to transform it into
ambition.

In 1969, after a split with Hall, the Swampers—who were now working with
Jerry Wexler, a partner in Atlantic Records—opened the rival Muscle
Shoals Sound Studio, where the Staple Singers, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan,
and many others later recorded. But Hall kept going at FAME. In 1970, he
produced the Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple,” which went to No. 1 and earned
him a Grammy nomination for Producer of the Year. He was inducted into
the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, in 1985, and received the
Grammy Trustees Award, in 2014.

Muscle Shoals remains remarkable not just for the music made there but
for its unlikeliness as an epicenter of anything; that a tiny town in a
quiet corner of Alabama became a hotbed of progressive, integrated
rhythm and blues still feels inexplicable. Whatever Hall conjured
there—whatever he dreamt, and made real—is essential to any recounting
of American ingenuity. It is a testament to a certain kind of hope.

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